Friday, March 24, 2017

Native Americans

In the United States, Native Americans (also known as
American Indians, Amerindians, Indigenous Americans or simply Indians) are
people descended from the Pre-Columbian indigenous population of the land
within the country's modern boundaries. These peoples were composed of numerous
distinct tribes, bands, and ethnic groups, and many of these groups survive
intact today as partially sovereign nations.

Since the end of the 15th century, the migration of
Europeans to the Americas has led to centuries of population, cultural, and
agricultural transfer and adjustment between Old and New World societies, a
process known as the Columbian exchange. Most Native American groups had
historically preserved their histories by oral traditions and artwork, which
has resulted in the first written sources on the conflict being authored by
Europeans.

At the time of first contact, the indigenous cultures
were quite different from those of the proto-industrial and mostly Christian
immigrants. Some of the Northeastern and Southwestern cultures in particular
were matrilineal and operated on a more collective basis than the Europeans
were familiar with. The majority of Indigenous American tribes maintained their
hunting grounds and agricultural lands for use of the entire tribe. Europeans
at that time had patriarchal cultures and had developed concepts of individual
property rights with respect to land that were extremely different. The
differences in cultures between the established Native Americans and immigrant
Europeans, as well as shifting alliances among different nations in times of
war, caused extensive political tension, ethnic violence, and social
disruption. Even before the European settlement of what is now the United
States, Native Americans suffered high fatalities from contact with European
diseases spread throughout the Americas by the Spanish to which they had yet
not acquired immunity. Smallpox epidemics are thought to have caused the
greatest loss of life for indigenous populations, although estimates of the
pre-Columbian population of what today constitutes the U.S. vary significantly,
from one million to eighteen million.

After the thirteen colonies revolted against Great
Britain and established the United States, President George Washington and
Henry Knox conceived of the idea of "civilizing" Native Americans in
preparation for assimilation as U.S. citizens. Assimilation (whether voluntary,
as with the Choctaw, or forced) became a consistent policy through American
administrations. During the 19th century, the ideology of manifest destiny
became integral to the American nationalist movement. Expansion of
European-American populations to the west after the American Revolution
resulted in increasing pressure on Native American lands, warfare between the
groups, and rising tensions. In 1830, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian
Removal Act, authorizing the government to relocate Native Americans from their
homelands within established states to lands west of the Mississippi River,
accommodating European-American expansion. This resulted in the ethnic
cleansing of many tribes, with the brutal, forced marches coming to be known as
The Trail of Tears.

As American expansion reached into the West, settler and
miner migrants came into increasing conflict with the Great Basin, Great
Plains, and other Western tribes. These were complex nomadic cultures based on
(introduced) horse culture and seasonal bison hunting. They carried out
resistance against United States incursion in the decades after the completion
of the Civil War and the Transcontinental Railroad in a series of Indian Wars,
which were frequent up until the 1890s but continued into the 20th century.
Over time, the United States forced a series of treaties and land cessions by
the tribes and established reservations for them in many western states. U.S.
agents encouraged Native Americans to adopt European-style farming and similar
pursuits, but European-American agricultural technology of the time was
inadequate for often dry reservation lands, leading to mass starvation. In
1924, Native Americans who were not already U.S. citizens were granted
citizenship by Congress.

Contemporary Native Americans have a unique relationship
with the United States because they may be members of nations, tribes, or bands
with sovereignty and treaty rights. Cultural activism since the late 1960s has
increased political participation and led to an expansion of efforts to teach
and preserve indigenous languages for younger generations and to establish a
greater cultural infrastructure: Native Americans have founded independent
newspapers and online media, recently including First Nations Experience, the
first Native American television channel; established Native American studies
programs, tribal schools and universities, and museums and language programs;
and have increasingly been published as authors.

The terms used to refer to Native Americans have at times
been controversial. The ways Native Americans refer to themselves vary by
region and generation, with many older Native Americans self-identifying as
"Indians" or "American Indians", while younger Native
Americans often identify as "Indigenous" or "Aboriginal".
The term "Native American" has been adopted by major newspapers and
some academic groups, but has not traditionally included Native Hawaiians or certain
Alaskan Natives, such as Aleut, Yup'ik, or Inuit peoples. By comparison, the
indigenous peoples of Canada are generally known as First Nations.